The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective
By Steven Johnson

The crimes:

With Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite in 1867, criminals and revolutionaries were handed a new weapon in their war on the ruling classes and peace, order, and good government more generally. To fight against a spate of bombings, law enforcement had to up their game and develop the kinds of practices we now associate with modern policing.

The book:

If that summary of what The Infernal Machine is about seems kind of broad, don’t blame me. Steven Johnson specializes in these sorts of popular history grab-bags, and the elements are even more random than usual here. Just for starters I had to shake my head at the subtitle calling this “a true story” – not because any of it is fiction but because there is no story in evidence. The narrative, to give it a fuzzier label, takes us basically from the assassination of Alexander II to the Palmer Raids, with various bombings in-between. Are there threads connecting all of this? Sure. But all too often they struck me as coincidental. I mean, if you stand back far enough, tilt your head, and squint, then I guess everything is connected to everything else on some level. But not really.

I’ll stick to talking about the two main narrative axes that Johnson travels along. The first is political or thematic:

This book . . . is the story of two ideas, ideas that first took root in Europe before arriving on American soil at the end of the nineteenth century, where they locked into an existential struggle that lasted three decades. One idea was the radical vision of a society with no rules – and a new tactic of dynamite-driven terrorism deployed to advance that vision. The other idea – crime fighting as information science – took longer to take shape, and for a good stretch of the early twentieth century, it seemed like it was losing its struggle against the anarchists. But it won out in the end. How did that happen? And could the story have played out differently?

Later, Johnson expresses the terms of this “existential struggle” in slightly different terms, seeing “two rival ideologies” in conflict: “the dream of a stateless society, radically egalitarian, free of the oppressive institutions that had come to define the industrial and imperial age” vs. “the surveillance state, where individual identity is measured, recorded, and archived by vast and often invisible institutions, using the latest science and technology to contain potential subversion.”

This is interesting, but was there really that strong a connection between these two ideas or ideologies? Anarchism never took political root anywhere, but was that because it lost an existential struggle with scientific crime fighting? The surveillance state and modern policing are now ubiquitous facts of life, but did that have anything to do with these early battles against bomb throwers?

I think both developments were, if not inevitable, then at least very likely to have taken place without any engagement with the other. Anarchism suffered the fate of a lot of socialist movements with the outbreak of the First World War, while crime fighting was being driven as much by the advance of technology and the response to other threats like organized crime as it was by dealing with political enemies. And then of course there is the difficulty of defining terms. What is, or was, anarchism anyway? A libertarian movement? A call for class warfare? Were the anarchists who practiced “propaganda of the deed” typical of anarchist thought, or outliers? Is it fair to say that all that survives of the anarchist movement today is terrorist bombings like the 9/11 attacks (“the general tactics of terrorism remain anarchism’s most enduring legacy”)? That seems tenuous to me. Terrorism was a tool used by different ideologies, and it predates the invention of dynamite.

The second narrative axis is built around telling the life stories of a pair of prominent anarchists: Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. As a biographical sketch of the two what you get here is fine, but again the connection to “infernal machines” (that is, explosive devices) and modern policing isn’t that strong. They were both anarchists, of a sort. Maybe Berkman was in cahoots with a cell of bomb makers at some point. Goldman probably wasn’t. The police kept thick files on both, though they were prominent public figures and didn’t keep any secrets when it came to their radical beliefs. So again: is there a connection? Yes, but not a strong one. Neither story really depends on the other.

The critics on the back cover rave: “Johnson is a polymath. . . . [It’s] exhilarating to follow his unpredictable trains of thought” (Los Angeles Times); “Johnson’s erudition can be quite gobsmacking” (New York Times Book Review). I think my gob may be harder to smack. To me, The Infernal Machine just seemed like a whole lot of everything and not much of anything in particular. The effect was sort of like reading a bunch of linked Wikipedia articles. Did Johnson really need to kick off a chapter on the Ludlow Massacre with an account of how coal deposits were formed in the Cretaceous period? That’s not erudition, it’s just cheap display of superficial learning.

There are a few perceptive moments. I liked it when the following comparison was drawn between then and now.

Berkman and Goldman were living in a world where one side of the spectrum thought it was appropriate to execute people who objected to a seventy-two-hour week of life-threatening work – while the other side of the spectrum thought that we should abandon both governments and corporations and reinvent society along the lines of Swiss watchmaking collectives. Those were the distant poles of the debate. What we would now call the Overton window – the space of potentially valid political beliefs – was far wider than anything in American politics today.

That’s well observed, and it’s a point that’s expanded on after a description of the public memorial service held for a group of anarchists who had blown themselves up while constructing a bomb meant to avenge Ludlow:

More than a century later, it is not hard to imagine a small band of disaffected New York City residents – in our present moment – spinning themselves into some kind of cyclone of hate and building a dirty bomb or a bioweapon in their basement. What is harder to imagine is five thousand people showing up in Union Square to mourn their deaths as martyrs to a greater cause. We still have people willing to kill for political ends in countries like the United States, though far fewer of them than there were back in 1914. But when those beliefs materialize into actual dead bodies, you don’t conventionally see a great outpouring of public support for those violent acts. There were no rallies for the Unabomber.

This is something work keeping in mind when thinking of how we live in an age of extremes. I still think it’s fair to consider various schools of political thought today as extreme, but they’re extreme in different ways. One of the things that has changed the most is the level of sheer crazy we’ve grown accustomed to.

Noted in passing:

Johnson uses the word “attentat” over a dozen times in this book. It wasn’t familiar to me, though it’s the same word (same meaning, same spelling) in both French and German as in English. The basic meaning is of a violent criminal act, or assassination. It also has a legal meaning in English, but that is considered obsolete. In fact, I found several sources online that give its use as meaning an attack or assassination as obsolete as well. So I can’t blame myself for being surprised to see it. But it’s properly employed, as it correctly describes the bombings and attempted assassinations that are a big part of Johnson’s subject matter, and was used by Goldman herself, though she capitalized it. I suspect reading Goldman is where Johnson might have picked it up. So I did learn something here, though it’s not a word I’m likely to ever use myself.

Takeaways:

There’s no invention or technical advance that can’t be made to serve wicked ends. And given time, almost any invention will end up being so used.

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